The Overpopulation Lie

The belief I held for 35 years crumbled.

HK Mid-levels 21 Robinson Road - Conway Mans - 8 March 2011

Last week, I posted a review of my least favorite book. You can read it here.

That book took one of the most destructive ideas in modern history, and turned it into a story.

Jordan Peterson calls stories, maps of meaning, and that is how he titled his first book. Our brains organize around story. Story tells us why we do what we do.

But not all stores are good ones. In North Korea, there is a highly fanciful tale about why the Kim family is ruling the country. The cult that was known as the Moonies when I was in high school and college is run by another set of Kims who have a story about why they should rule the world. Scientologists have a story about how we are all alien refugees, and the Mormons have a story about the prophet, Lehigh, fleeing from Jerusalem to the Americas.

While Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael is a work of fiction, the people who read it, take it as being rich with meaning.

That meaning is incredibly destructive.

I never read Paul Ehrlich’s the population bomb. However, when I was in high school, we were required to take a class called World Problems. Some issue was designated as a problem and then all of the negative branching effects that the issue created were examined. Then we looked at the precursors. We looked at three different issues. Not once were we invited to consider that any given issue might have positive effects. The one that stuck in my mind was overpopulation.

I was completely horrified at the multiplying problems we, the students, came up with in the class. It was a great example of the human mind doing what comes most easily - catastrophizing. The effects of overpopulation included pollution, resource depletion, and disease. Not once was ‘overpopulation’ defined. Unlike Daniel Quinn - who was willing to say that anything over hunter-gatherer levels of the human population is too much - my teachers didn’t explain what they meant but the term. [Human population 7,000 years ago was about 6 million] By the time I was done with the class, I could only imagine people jammed together as they were in cities in a world overrun, as if by locusts. It was horrifying, and more than a 10th-grader should’ve had to deal with.

That was 1979-1980.

It wasn’t until I started studying the economic theories behind libertarianism around 2014 that I came across a different viewpoint. Julian Simmon’s, The Ultimate Resource talked about the benefits of a large human population. The idea was completely shocking.

How could something I had been worrying about for 35 years be a non-issue? And not just a non-issue but a good thing? I didn’t believe it.

What forced me to look at the upside of the planet having over 10 billion people was the moral aspect. Reducing the population means that people die. As a kid, I saw many starving children on television during the Ethiopian famine. ‘Please give money to send food to these poor humans.’ They were ubiquitous. We don’t see such pictures on our screens now unless we deliberately look for them. Supporting population reduction meant we should leave those skeletal children to die.

Which is exactly what Daniel Quinn implies in his book. He stopped short of saying it. Ishmael - the gorilla and guru - just shrugs when his student asks if we should let people in poor countries starve.

But what if - as is suggested in Quinn’s nasty fairy tale - people don’t just naturally die off from disease and starvation? Quinn assumes that the hard choices will be made for him and there will be no need to approach the problem as the Chinese and Soviets did. De-population as a moral imperative is toxic and terrible. The Chinese, Soviets, the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, and the Kims in North Korea, all believed that killing off millions of people is the right thing to do, the path to a happy society. It’s for the good of humanity after all. [Please note that I wasn’t leading the way for depopulation either.]

It’s a short step from ‘there are too many people,’ to ‘we should get rid of some of them on purpose.’

Having realized the horror and hard reality of the moral stance I held, I still needed to find a way to come to peace with the idea that there were ‘too many’ people on the planet.

Turns out, that was the easy part. The first thing I didn’t realize was just how big the planet is. Turns out you could fit every human on the planet in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, and give them a New York-sized apartment. [Which is what those promoting 15-minute cities would like.] We are nowhere near overflowing at the seams.

Not even close.

However, I had other fears about population levels I had to address, for example, feeding everyone. The libertarians and economists [and assorted other people on the Right] like to cite the green revolution and GMOs as a solution. Libertarians are often big fans of technology, only looking at the possible upside while ignoring the downside. They miss the toxic realities of industrial farming and the health effects of how we produce and eat foodstuffs in the 21st century.

I’m not a fan of GMOs. Not because I assume they are toxic. But they’re too new for us to know what long-term effects they might have on bodies that didn’t evolve to process whatever is in there. What IS true, is that GMO crops are designed to have large amounts of pesticides sprayed on them. Eating pesticides in any amount just adds to our toxic load and kills gut bacteria. So I didn’t see GMOs as an answer. Nor was industrial farming. Modern farming methods are rapidly depleting aquifers, the volume of healthy soil, and soil health.

It turns out that industrial farming practices-including the use of GMOs - isn’t necessary to feed the human population. Yes, even with 7 billion. I’ve written here about Permaculture, biodynamic farming, and regenerative grazing practices. In addition, long-term water-retention practices [and increasing CO2] have been slowly greening deserts in India and China. Food is being produced in places that were ‘inhabitable’ or ‘marginal.’

These methods that work with nature produce far more food per acre than industrial mono-production farms. Industrial farming was never more productive than mixed-use farms. What industrial agriculture allowed, was for more people to enter the wider industrial production system. How much better that’s made life for humans can - and should be - debated.

Next to examine was death by disease. This is often a function of existing starvation and ill health. Since there’s no reason people can’t be fed there’s no reason for this to be an issue either.

From an environmental perspective, once people in poor countries get above a yearly income of a mere few thousand dollars they start taking an interest in their environment because they want their children to have a clean place to live. Keeping the local environment clean, then becomes more of a priority. In addition, once people have more wealth, they stop having so many children and invest more of their time and energy in fewer offspring.

And then there’s the climate. That wasn’t being related to population levels when I was in high school. That’s because we’d only recently gotten over the idea that we were going into another ice age, and were primarily concerned with acid rain. [Although it might have been the hole in the ozone layer. Bad humans.] I don’t buy the idea that more people = climate disaster, but that’s next week’s post: The Glorious Benefits of More CO2.

All of these things are important, but there are genuine benefits to having more people. The most simple and obvious answer is that the more people we have the more minds we have available to solve problems. this is Julian Simon’s ‘ultimate resource.’ Every location has its own unique issues, and the more people who live there, the more likely it is that someone will come up with a solution to make people’s lives better. [Only the people who live there can decide what that means.]

From an economic standpoint, the complexity of our society requires a great many people in order to run it. We need people at all levels of engagement with the economy in order to make things continue to flow smoothly. The supply chain issues during covid should be ample evidence for what happens when everyone isn’t working. Machines aren’t a good answer. They increase rather than decrease the level of complexity in that people are needed at even higher levels to design the machines, design the assembly lines for the machines, and repair the machines when they break down.

Humans matter. My education encouraged me to think of people, not as thinking, valuable beings but as parasites. Parasites that sucked up resources and spread disease. This is no better than the dehumanizing propaganda put out by the Nazis. Humans think. We evaluate. We want better lives for our children and will go to great lengths to see that happen. Buying into the idea that a substantial part of humanity is useless flesh is a path to moral depravity and self-hatred. Guilt about the fact that we exist leaves us psychologically vulnerable to manipulation. Guilt leaves us depressed and anxious and wondering how to fix the ‘problem we caused.’

Ultimately, the belief that there are ‘too many people’ is self-destructive. This belief sapped my energy and was one reason among many that I hesitated to have children, something I regret. If you think there are too many people, who are you willing to kill off to create the world as it ‘should’ be? What might someone do to achieve such an end?

I have to wonder WHY this class was being shoved down our throats in 1979. WHY was there no definition of what was meant by ‘overpopulation?’ Why did we only examine negative effects? What is the value of an education that frames things in such an inaccurate manner to young people who aren’t equipped to - and not permitted to -criticize the instructor?

The answers I come up with don’t look good.

I’m happy to not be focusing on non-problems. We have real issues that need addressing. And maybe, that’s exactly the point.

I’ve looked for and found guidance in making my life better. Here are some newsletters that might make yours better.

Andrew Lokenauth puts advice in easy-to-understand terms in his Money Mastery and Wealth Building newsletter.

Matt Leo talks about communication and people skills that apply to the home the board room.

Tim Ebl fights back against the steamroller of health issues with how to restore what we’ve lost to 21th-century food and habits.

Unskool offers insights and alternatives to the sucking pit of our education system

Bobby Dimitrov and Healthy Farming, Healthy Food share their journey on how to build a food production system that is better for humans and better for the planet.

Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; four boyz and one cranky gurl. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, and the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition.